Datasets:

OpenPipe

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hacker-news

like 10

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eli

This has been attempted a few times before without a whole lot of success. There was one plugin launched fairly recently that added a sidebar user-contributed Wiki to every site. And there was another before that where you could add virtual "graffiti" to sites. It's a neat idea, but I think it'll be pretty difficult to generate a critical mass (before it gets overtaken by spam and trolls)

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immad

It would be stupid for myspace to do it, they would piss off a lot of there most active users. Kind off makes sense for things like revver where myspace give there own competitive offering. Who knows they might do something stupid and give an advantage to other social networks.

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trevelyan

Anyone know what he means by the "No threading etc." comment in: 'It's a tool. The community can grow elsewhere. No threading etc. "del.icio.us sux" is an awful experience I'd rather user's didn't have.'

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eli

Good point. I think (well, actually, I *know*) that their are companies out there who have been waiting--specifically--for Yahoo to acquire them. Just look at all those Dodgeball clones or Writely clones out there with no real business model.

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eli

After you edit a comment, it's very difficult to figure out how to get back to the discussion. This is a problem with posting a comment or performing other actions too, but it's particularly annoying when you edit a comment.

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pg

This is a real problem. When a partner from WSGR came to speak at YC, I asked her what was the single worst mistake made by inexperienced founders, and she said it was being sloppy with stock.

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Harj

Software Exploited by Pirates Goes to Work for Hollywood

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/technology/25bit.html?ex=1330059600&en=7b224e0313e84cff&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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kul

erm, the technology cannot be copied for less than $100k.

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Alex3917

&#62;Joi Ito, founder of Neoteny, a venture firm, and former chair of Infoseek Japan, has joined a group of technologists advising Dean ... I contact him to ask if he tihnks there&#39;s a difference between an emergent leader and an old-fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito e-mails back an odd metaphor: &#34;You&#39;re not a leader, you&#39;re a place. You&#39;re like a park or a garden. If it&#39;s comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not really about Dean. It&#39;s about us.&#34;<p>Facebook is a place. Think of it like Manhattan. What creates value isn&#39;t the population (the users). Nor is it the buildings (the technology). What creates value is the emergent social interactions and the culture that occur there. To put it in geek terms, it&#39;s not the instances of people, but rather what goes on in the interstices between them.<p>To quote Howard Rheingold, &#34;The &#39;killer app&#39; of tomorrow won&#39;t be software or hardware devices, but the social practices they make possible. The most far-reaching changes will come from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that this future infrastructure will make possible.&#34;

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mattculbreth

Six Things to do with OpenID

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Feb/25/six/

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mu

Test Comment

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brett

Definitely. I have seen at least couple other firefox extensions to do the same thing (here&#39;s one: http://www.yakalike.com/). I was involved in a drawing/graffiti type one last year (http://drawhere.com). It was fun to try and get done in javascript, but it was hard to hold people&#39;s interest for an extended period. There&#39;s a history of this stuff failing: http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42803-2,00.html<p>I&#39;ll be curious to see if/how someone gets it to stick.

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brett

here&#39;s another one: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon.php?id=1825

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brett

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dangrsmind

I&#39;d say I&#39;m a little skeptical.<p>The first question I&#39;d have is how fast they can parse video. The second is how much it costs to do it. <p>It seems you would have to be able to do recognition much faster than real-time for a realistic web video search capability (see for example http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=599600) and you would certainly need a lot of hardware to do this at scale for millions of video clips.<p>See also: http://www.newmediamusings.com/blog/2005/09/blinkx_a_citize.html

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jadams

I heard a rumour that each instance is 6MB of source code, alone!

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jrbedard

Threadless founders seminar

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/02/mp3_of_founders.html

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reitzensteinm

Cool idea, but I don&#39;t think the terms and conditions would allow it. You&#39;re not allowed to embed them directly into an application. A HTML page that the application displays that is accessible from any browser should be OK, but you&#39;d lose the &#39;sense&#39; part. Maybe ads for the most popular sites, with specially created HTML pages with hidden text (if Google overlooks that, which I doubt) that guides the adsense, would work.<p>It has been a while since I looked at it - I was pondering building a consumer app supported by adsense but decided it was probably too much trouble.

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jwp

I&#39;m glad you linked to the talk. It&#39;s excellent. <p>I&#39;m curious, why do you think that visual games are more likely to be successful? His question answering games seemed useful and engaging, too. <p>There must be great startup ideas lurking behind this idea of games and Human Computation. (Luis alludes to as much, with his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the ESP game double as a dating service.)

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rtm

How OkCupid prevents break-ins despite buggy code

http://www.okws.org/doku.php

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reitzensteinm

Critical mass for something like this is a nasty problem, but I think it could be cracked. Firefox is a bit of a selective user base to begin with (the +/- 10% userbase are probably very heavily weighted towards the tech savvy), and if you could get critical mass for one site that has a large Firefox user base on which the chat would be very helpful (say, Wikipedia) spreading out from there could be just a matter of time if you play your cards right.<p>Also, I haven&#39;t tried it, but I do hope there&#39;s an option to easily disable it because, after all, _I_ am only looking at the realnursestakeiteverywhere.com for educational purposes, but I definitely don&#39;t want to talk with those _other_ losers there.

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jwp

IANAL either (although I do date one), and I too have heard of these things. I think they are called E-2 visas. They require you to raise or invest around $100k in a US business. The lawyer who told me about the E-2 was quick to warn that the applications get scrutinized hard. It sounded political, vaguely sketchy, expensive, and complicated.

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reitzensteinm

Would an implicit +2 for every unique user that posts a comment in the thread be a good idea? Or maybe number of characters in comments / 10, where only those comments posted by people with Karma of &#62;10 are counted? Or maybe there should be a longetivity modifier, where a topic that was heavily voted up and discussed at length should stay for, say, twice as long as a topic that was just voted heavily up? <p>Or there could be a &#39;Top Discussions&#39; side by side with &#39;Top&#39; so there&#39;s a different filter for people looking for news (which you want to be recent and not obscured by long running threads) and people looking for discussions (which I&#39;d argue will be more valuable if the popular ones are kept around for a while).<p>Open for abuse, most definitely, but if the purpose of this site is to build community, I think those topics that get discussed should be more easily accessed. Ideally people would appreciate some valuable discussion and upvote the thread, but this thread here is a perfect example of one that should probably stick around for a while, but has nearly 3x as many comments as upvotes.<p>Just throwing ideas out - tell me if I&#39;m crazy.

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python_kiss

Too many companies are like bad marriages

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/02/too_many_compan.html

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pg

They&#39;re all not launched and/or making something new.

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pg

Web 2.0 Report

http://www.oreilly.com/radar/web2report.csp

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Elfan

The genius of Facebook was getting students at elite universities to divulge lots of potentially profitable information for advertising. They did this because Facebook was an exclusive place just for elite college kids (and later just college kids). Now that its open to everyone it no longer has that value. I don&#39;t see how it can reasonably continue to increase in value (although they could certainly find a greater fool to sell it to).

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Alex3917

Also, in Firefox on OS X some of the comments are gray and others are black. Why is this?

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brett

This was a pretty interesting watch, though I sorta had it going in the background while I did other stuff. The &#34;we-wont-do-it-unless-we-are-having-totally-awesome-fun-100%-of-the-time&#34; approach clearly needs to be taken with a grain (or pound) of salt, but I like to hope that it speaks to the power of being real excited about your products given they have definitely done a few things right with threadless. <p>The stress the motto &#34;Your project is not good enough&#34;.

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rms

I like OK Cupid because of the word play in their name, just like the OK Computer album.

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jwp

I work on speech recognition. What Blinkx is doing isn&#39;t novel. (Sorry, Blinkx.) Google has top speech researchers working on search for speech and video. Same for MSFT. Remember the Kai-Fu Lee thing? The guy who built CMU Sphinx, an open-source HMM-based speech recognizer, in the late 80s? He and many other solid speech people are at Google to work on searching audio/video.<p>And there are other companies in this space, but they tend to center around US gov customers. Virage is one. It&#39;s owned by the Autonomy group, where, according to the article, the founder of this company used to work. <p>There&#39;s also Podzinger, a subsidary of BBN, which is another company that gets a lot of gov business. Podzinger runs BBN&#39;s speech recognition system on podcasts and videos, and pipes the output to a search engine: &#60;http://podzinger.com/&#62;. <p>I could go on... And if people are interested, I&#39;d be happy to post links to some relevant papers and tools.<p>To my mind 2 interesting things are going on here. 1) The company appears to be thriving by applying 20 year-old stuff from the lab to a new problem, in apparently no special way. (And that&#39;s not a bad thing!) 2) They got an article in the NYT business section to talk about Hidden Markov Models. Although maybe that&#39;s not so surprising, since hedge funds have recently started speaking out about using machine learning.

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staunch

MySpace&#39;s success came in spite of their technology, not because of it. There&#39;s nothing technical at MySpace worthy of emulation. A real technology startup could have done much better.

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hwork

The one thing this article screamed to me but isn&#39;t outright said is maybe you shouldn&#39;t be handing out the shares so liberally in the first place? I was wondering what others thought about this. Of course I say this as my ETS (Estimate Time to Startup) is a few months away....

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ereldon

Congrats for the good review, Jessica!

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/02/25/the_best_book_f.html

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rms

I was in Barnes and Nobles a couple weekends ago and the book was prominently placed in the business section; it&#39;s great that she is getting good in-store placement too.

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jwp

The first link you cited is spot on. The authors are from Univ of Cambridge, and work on HTK &#60;http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/&#62;. <p>That paper is 10 years old. As I&#39;m sure you can imagine, there have been improvements in the field since then. To be completely honest, I don&#39;t stay on top of search applied to speech, but the keyword you want is &#34;Spoken Document Retrieval&#34; (SDR). Ciprian Chelba and TJ Hazen do cool stuff in this area; they are giving a tutorial at ICASSP this year SDR.<p>An aside. Both of these approaches use the fact that when you process speech, you essentially form a graph of words (or phonemes). Paths through the graph represent possible transcriptions. So, since graph is a denser, richer thing to search than the transcript, and we&#39;ve got graph algorithms sitting around, there are neat tricks you can do to build a search engine index for speech... <p>I&#39;ve recently been reading some interesting work that uses locality-sensitive hashing to search audio. The Google speech people are presenting a lot of it at ICASSP this year. See this post for more, and chase the links in their papers for even more: &#60;http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2007/02/hear-here-sample-of-audio-processing.html&#62;

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hwork

I&#39;m not sure of the experiences from other early facebook adopting schools -- but my old school (Bowdoin College) was among the first -- and it&#39;s still like crack to them. Not as ridiculous as a few years ago, but it&#39;s still wickedly popular. And from my perspective the alum retention rate, as the article mentions, is very strong.<p>I think the genius of Facebook is not just the eliteness, but instead a new word I&#39;ll makeup called &#39;localness&#39;. Facebook cordons off the scary, wild web and presents you with people that you know or could at least see yourself knowing or bumping into. Combine that with early entry into the social networking world, very strong and appealing UI, and yes, eliteness, and a few years later, you&#39;ve got 18 million users.

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manuel

Amazon working on database web service?

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=43576

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Nick_Smith

Who would you suggest emulating?

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rtm

How MySQL Cluster works

http://vldb.idi.ntnu.no/program/paper/wed/p1108-ronstrom.pdf

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danielha

Startup Nightlife: SF Beta

http://valleywag.com/tech/nightlife/party-report-sf-beta-at-111-minna-239323.php

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hwork

Idea: A Better Social News Site

http://www.markmcgranaghan.com/2007/02/02/idea-a-better-social-news-site/

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danielha

If you are going to launch a startup, how many friends would you need?

http://blogs.msdn.com/testing123/archive/2007/02/23/if-you-are-going-to-build-a-startup-how-many-friends-should-you-start-up-with.aspx

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simonbc

Best and Worst Decisions (Part 2)

http://www.startupping.com/2007/02/22/best-and-worst-decisions-part-2/

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danielha

Oh boy, that&#39;d be so useful for me. If I was using a Mac I would be all over that.

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danielha

Tor Open to Attack! (pdf)

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/publications/reports/docs/CU-CS-1025-07.pdf

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immad

Yep, I just threw out a figure and later realised it was way off. It is definitly a fraction of $8 bill though.

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danielha

If any of you guys are familiar with anonymous Internet systems, this is a really cool read. It basically outlines a possible attack against something like Tor by linking together paths of entry/exit to trace (identify) a user.<p>Tor was one of the items covered in a presentation on online identities that I did last week here on my campus.

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immad

That is interesting. So the question becomes; how do you put a value on a virtual place?

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danielha

When submitting a link, sometimes I want to add a text in addition to the title. Usually I just add a comment in the discuss/comments section, but it&#39;d be nice to have a field for that specifically.<p>This works especially well if you&#39;re submitting a link and want to add a remark about why it might be relevant for others to check out.

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jwecker

For the Uninitiated- When You _Really_ Want to Scale

http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html

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staunch

Fox is short-sighted, non-technical, and greedy. They had to buy a start-up for over half a billion dollars precisely because they can&#39;t develop software themselves.<p>Some other company just needs to harness the third party sites and build a the big ecosystem MySpace is neglecting to build.

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fnord123

Novel insights of the social entrepreneur

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/8ff614a0-ad4e-11db-8709-0000779e2340.html

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fnord123

FT Wealth Forum: Web 2.0 or Bubble 2.0?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7924ede0-abce-11db-a0ed-0000779e2340.html

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Forcicle

His site is down: Google cache:<p>now it&#39;s up again nm

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Nick_Smith

Anyone have any hands on experience with this?

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jwecker

I do. Erlang is a blast. It&#39;s a language/platform specifically developed to be very scalable and very fault tolerant- because it was designed for telecommunications systems. Here&#39;s a nice write up from some of the guys at Sendmail: http://www.jetcafe.org/~npc/doc/euc00-sendmail.html<p>It&#39;s not a particularly popular language (I guess no functional language is)- and has only started gaining traction the last few years. Which means nothing of course. It&#39;s a bit of an oversimplification, but to me Erlang is to pi-calculus what Lisp is to lambda-calculus.

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aglarond

It looks to be a good resource. I like the &#34;Weekly Summary&#34; as a quick overview of what&#39;s been going on at startupping. The wiki seems to be a good resource for specific areas.

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aglarond

I remember reading this in high school, for a book report. It is a great source of inspiration. I&#39;m glad it&#39;s now online. Thomas Edison is also one of the historical figures I admire most. (An online biography here: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=217855 or here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/820/820-h/820-h.htm)

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Forcicle

FOUNDERS AT WORK FULL PDF

http://torrentspy.com/torrent/1069017/Founders_At_Work_FULL_PDF_Stories_of_Startups_Early_Days_Jessica_Livingston

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xyzzy

What&#39;s the actual problem with Apache? Do you suppose it is running out of RAM in which to store thread stacks?<p>I wonder if old pre-forked process Apache would have done better, since it&#39;s not so easy to trick it into consuming infinite memory.

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shinbone

niiiiiiice

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aglarond

I get the impression that the success of a startup depends upon how much room is given for &#34;constructive failures&#34;. By &#34;room&#34;, I mean enough funding and a forgiving market.

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danw

O&#39;r you could buy the book and support the writer..

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reitzensteinm

Why is there no downvote option for links, only for comments? Some stuff legitimately needs burial.

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smackaysmith

Perhaps a button to mark a story as inappropriate? Like this one... pointing to a torrent for a book is a bit slimy.

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reitzensteinm

What I find interesting isn&#39;t so much that the mean is around two, but how strongly the median is two. Are the benefits of having two founders over one (soundboard off each other, keep each other motivated) and problems of lack of focus and communication overhead of 3+ founders so strong that a startup of two is more likely to succeed, or is two just the most natural size for a startup to condense at?<p>I guess the other possibility is that the sample in the article is skewed to make a point...

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jwecker

@Forcicle- are you confusing this site with a warez site? the all caps title is lame too. If Jessica released it as a free PDF it would be another matter altogether. Have some respect dude.

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volida

great irony. just few minutes ago my hard copy arrived

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volida

I made the average some time ago for a successful domain name and its 6.5

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mattculbreth

Needless to say this won&#39;t help his startup&#39;s chances at YC.

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jwecker

From the amazon page for this book: What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?<p>91% buy the item featured on this page | 6% buy Dreaming in Code... | 1% buy Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive... | 1% buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J. K. Rowling<p>What could it mean? :)

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jwecker

(he finished this)

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jwecker

Nitpick. I noticed this is working now when you type two newlines, but when it&#39;s just one newline it translates into a space. I&#39;m probably the only one who cares though...

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dpapathanasiou

Right, it&#39;s a strategy you could decide to use. The only downside is if you don&#39;t get acquired, you&#39;re forced to shut down.<p>YC&#39;s application asks both &#34;How will you make money?&#34; and &#34;Which companies would be most likely to buy you?&#34; so I was interested in finding out which strategy they&#39;re most likely to advocate in practice

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davidw

Heh... mine too, along with a bunch of other recommended ones.<p>There&#39;s something kind of frustrating shelling out a bunch of money to read about people who already have a bunch of it, written by someone who has a bunch of it... sigh. Hope it&#39;s worth it.<p>(BTW, I expect other people to respect the licenses on the things I create, so I certainly wouldn&#39;t violate others&#39; licenses, but still, sometimes it&#39;s a frustrating feeling).

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Forcicle

You&#39;re welcome. (to the 21st century)

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Forcicle

FOUNDERS AT WORK - FULL PDF

http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1040066/11715372/

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palish

On Improving Schools

http://www.classbug.com/idea.html

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mattculbreth

Bruce Eckel&#39;s Notes on Pycon 2007

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=196792

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Alex3917

Well how do you put a value on a place like Wall Street? It&#39;s not the number of people or the number of computers. It&#39;s what people do there and the amount of money flowing through. As someone said below, when you have this ability to datamine 18 million kids (in aggregate) then you&#39;re pretty much sitting on a mint. Every time one kid posts on another kid&#39;s wall, it&#39;s more data to feed into the system. College-aged kids are probably the most valuable demographic to marketers in general (not because college kids have the most money, but because marketers like marketing to them because it makes them feel young), and college-age kids who actually go to college are even more valuable because they have more money on average.

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jwecker

That&#39;s definitely part of it- they are heavyweight threads or processes (no matter how you configure it) (rather than lightweight erlang threads). I would imagine the bigger problem here, however, is context switching. Because Apache (and most other servers) use OS threading or forking, the entire state of the current process (let&#39;s say) has to be put aside and then restored later, maybe after only a few milliseconds- because the OS isn&#39;t going to presume anything about the state of that process. In Erlang&#39;s concurrency model it simply runs 20 (or so, I think- anyway some static number) functions and then goes to another process.<p>Because the functions are, uh, functional there is almost no state to save and restore when there is a context switch. Also because things like iteration are done with recursion- the 20 functions and then context switch doesn&#39;t get hung up on some loop somewhere. The faster the OS tries to keep switching between processes, the more overhead it introduces.<p>BTW, this is why in my opinion you don&#39;t see a lot of other systems duplicating this sort of concurrency model- because there are some language &#34;limitations&#34; (recursion only, for example) that make it possible.<p>Most apache, erlang, or kernel hackers would know way more about this than I do, of course.

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volida

I was at LeWeb3 and I witnessed Weebly&#39;s presentation at the startup corner. Overall of what I remember was that they guy that was presenting was prepared and knew what he was talking about. Comparing to some other presenters who were lost, very stressed and therefore getting you tired and losing you, the difference was obvious. Yoono and Weebly were the highlights for me at the start up corner...<p>I was trying to find the video from the presentation... www.vpod.tv has an archive with leweb3, but no luck

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jwecker

wait a second... is this pg? are you testing your anti-spam code? http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Forcicle

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jwecker

linked at the bottom of the main page. n/m

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Alex3917

The average number of founders in successful startups doesn&#39;t mean much unless it is from a random sample of startups that have both succeeded and failed.<p>If you looked at a graph of the total dataset, what you&#39;d see is that almost all startups with only one founder fail. So the reason the successful startups you list mostly have two founders may not be because two is the optimum number, but rather because two is the next smallest (and therefore most common) number after one. We can&#39;t tell without additional data.

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jwecker

Fun, games lead to making it big online

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orange/orl-mybloglog2607feb26,0,2953985.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-orange

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jwecker

The name MyBlogLog makes me think of the lawyer in Arrested Development- Bob Loblaw (you have to say it out loud) :)

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jwecker

When Google buys your company- remember your customers

http://www.techworld.nl/idgns/2448/jotspot-users-give-google-mixed-reviews.html

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jwecker

The Decline and Fall of the Palm Empire

http://www.techworld.com/mobility/features/index.cfm?featureid=3192&#38;pagtype=samechan

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jwecker

:)<p>Ah- I looked it up. It&#39;s better than XP anyway http://tmsoft.com/article-genome.html

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jwecker

An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/business/media/26adco.html?ex=1330146000&#38;en=90f49a17f2ed1e45&#38;ei=5090&#38;partner=rssuserland&#38;emc=rss

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danw

Ah yes, because posting it once isn&#39;t enough

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jwecker

Great illustrations :)

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bluemoo

The difficulty of keeping everyone informed increases greatly when you go from 2 to three people, as you go from one communication channel to three. A small programming team can take advantage of easy communication to have better efficiency over a large team, and I imagine that the advantages are similar for all of the tasks in a startup. Because a startup is desperately trying to make itself successful before running out of money, efficiency is probably even more important and increases the chance of success disproportionate to the increase from having more people involved.

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bluemoo

Definately return to the main page after editing a comment please. I think I hit &#39;update&#39; 3 times before even thinking about why I hadn&#39;t switched back.

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amichail

Here&#39;s my attempt at better social news: http://groups.google.com/group/forwarding-tree. You can try a fully functional service that works like this here: http://forwardingtree.com/

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msgbeepa

Last.fm Release Source Code IRCCat

http://www.last.fm/user/RJ/journal/2007/02/21/350855/

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jwecker

Thanks for that palish. Wow, what a difficult sector though. I&#39;ve worked with schools before and they don&#39;t have a lot of money- and when they do you have practically a year long sales cycle. So if I were to give you one piece of advice in that market- keep your overhead _very_ low if you want to make a profit! Oh, and sell the vision. It sounds trite but it is very important to your target demographic in particular- most are teaching because of the vision of the difference they are making and if you speak to that it will make a big difference.

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palish

Thanks for your insight jwecker, I appreciate it. One thing that is fundamentally different about what I&#39;m doing is that I&#39;m marketing to individual teachers, not schools. I believe that this may be the right way to go about this sort of thing; it leaves the decision up to the individual, instead of the school. Spending time with individual teachers will be very important too, and I&#39;m genuinely interested in helping them save time.